


Kisses Goodbye Are Against Company Policy

by GlitchCritter



Category: Original Work
Genre: COVID, Gen, Grief, vent - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:06:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26036854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GlitchCritter/pseuds/GlitchCritter
Summary: a short, emotional piece about visiting elderly relatives you only sort of know during quarantine.





	Kisses Goodbye Are Against Company Policy

The nurse is curt, laughing in the nervous way that means she is used to silence, to not being expected to respond. She goes through the rudimentary questions- have you interacted with anyone who has gotten COVID, have you experienced any symptoms, are you sure that you will not cause a plague that kills half the folks inside and then some. I lie and say I am not experiencing nausea, because I know (hope? trust?) it is unrelated and because it is so easy to lie about these things. Every time they take my temperature I’m convinced this is the end-they will find I am diseased and that I cannot be allowed to proceed. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. But I’m still healthy, and after the pen I sign the documents with is slathered in hand sanitizer we are free to sit and talk. It’s 9:18 and already at least eighty-five degrees. We were supposed to get here at 9:15, but I brushed my teeth and made us late. I regret it, but only because of the frenetic way my father looks around, trying to find Helen. 

She sits in a wheelchair beneath a plastic blue canopy, head lolling to the side. She isn’t strong enough to hold it upright. The nurse was kind and gave her pillows for underneath her swollen feet. She hasn’t worn shoes for months as far as I know. But I know so little. I don’t love her. By the time I was old enough to care she was too far gone, a slip, a shadow. She gives love to everyone, kindness to everyone, even if she barely knows them. She barely knows me-she knows my shadow, knows me at eight and twelve and fourteen, a child who rarely talked to her outside of what was polite, outside of the necessary rituals of children and their family. But every time I try to talk to her over the phone she says she loves me more than I will ever know, so I lie in return. I am good at kind lies. They are easy because every time my father looks at her it is with the tenderness of a child holding a bird with a broken wing- feather-soft gentle, desperate for signs of improvement. Wanting to hold and protect no matter what. 

We are given seats six feet apart, separated by yellow tape. We’re not in the garden full of roses and lantanas, or in the cement square molded to look like cobblestone dotted in inscrutable Jewish sculptures. We’re in the parking lot, on the side closest to the main road, which sends cymbal crashes and thundering jolts of noise every five seconds. Helen is almost deaf, and because we all have masks she cannot read my father’s lips. Sporadically a plane will churn the air and leaves us with one or two wasted minutes where nothing can be conveyed. She processes maybe every fifth sentence. Conversations of non sequiturs lead nowhere and end in her trailing off, not even realizing we are talking. Dad tries to keep it light, asking her about the nurses and her friends, but she hasn’t gone outside in months. She hates to go outside, hates to meet people, prefers to hide in her nine cubic feet of sanitized off-blue, watching the television. When dad tried to organize this meeting, at first she burst into tears, described how terrified she was of the air, the deadly poisons it contains. Now we’re here, we have thirty minutes, and we may never get more time. 

I stare, mostly. I came because she loves me, and I tell myself not to waste my father’s precious seconds. But I’m still my awkward self, so I try to contribute, to babble, especially because this is what my father expects of me. I see it in the way he shakes his leg. In the way he scratches his wrist. He is desperate, and incredibly sad.

Thirty minutes gone, and the only thing phrase she consistently understands and responds to is ‘I love you.’ We repeat it constantly for lack of anything else to say. The nurse comes back, and in her distanced way she laughs and tells Helen it’s time to go back in. We keep pace, trying to talk, until the border of the parking lot. We are not allowed to give her a hug goodbye.


End file.
